I dashed for the phone, hoping to answer it before the voicemail picked up.
"Hello," I said, breathing hard.
"Ken, it's Sam Clemens."
No, not that Sam Clemens. Sam is Samantha Clemens. She and her husband Dave live about two miles from me on Huckleberry Hill Road. We have the only houses for miles, so we've become pretty good neighbors. Dave is a realtor in town. He has done very well financially selling commercial real estate, and it shows. Their home is a 3500 square foot, two-story modern with a full-length pool and a separate guest house. It dwarfs my little two-bedroom bungalow, but since I'm alone, I don't need the space.
"Hi, Sam. Sorry I'm out of breath, but I was outside mowing the lawn."
"Oh, I'm sorry to catch you at a bad time. I was hoping you might be able to help me a little later on."
"Sure, what do you need?"
"Well, Dave's out of town for three days, and the new sliding patio door he ordered came in. I'm in town at the building supply now picking it up. The guys here will help me load it, but there's no way I can get it off the truck by myself without breaking it. I thought you might swing by a little later and help unload it. I'll buy you a beer by the pool for your trouble."
"Anything to get away from mowing the lawn. How soon do you want me there?"
"It'll take me about twenty minutes to get there from town, but you don't have to come right away if you're busy. I mean, I wouldn't want to deprive you of the joy of grass cutting," she said with a laugh.
"I'll be there."
I pulled up in the Clemens' driveway but didn't see Sam's pickup. No more than a minute later I saw her monster backing in beside me. She drives a Ford F-250 four wheel drive with dual rear tires. Sam is a small woman, maybe 5 foot 2 and 120 pounds soaking wet. Though she's fifty years old, she has kept herself very fit. She grew up on her family farm and could buck 95-pound hay bales better than any boy in town. She still does a lot of fairly heavy manual labor outdoors now, so she is well tanned. Her skin has begun to show a few of the effects of the combination of age and sun, but the hard work still keeps her muscles well toned. You wouldn't mistake her for a 30-year old woman, but there are several much younger women in town who envy her body.
I laughed when I saw her sitting behind the wheel of the F-250. Her head was just barely visible. But I'd seen her driving 40,000 pound GVW bulk trucks, and I knew the pickup was child's play for her.
She hopped down from the cab. She was wearing typical Sam attire: short sleeve gingham work shirt, denim skirt, and cowboy boots. If she hadn't been in town, she would have been in jeans rather than the skirt.
"Hey, Ken, thanks for coming. Dave'd kill me if I tried to unload this myself and broke it."
"No problem, Sam. Glad you called. What's this for? You guys going to be remodeling?"
"No, but we're replacing our old patio door with this new double-pane glass one. It'll be warmer in winter than the old one."
"Hmph. Makes sense. Is Dave going to install this himself or will he hire a contractor to do it?"
"Ken," she said in a tone mocking admonition, "You know as well as I do that if Dave tried to do this, it would end up in pieces and we'd have snow in the kitchen this coming winter."
She was right. Sam was definitely the carpenter in the Clemens house. Dave's idea of work was closing a deal on a shopping center.
"So, Sam, why don't you put it in. Goodness knows you can do anything a builder can do when it comes to using tools."
She smiled brightly at the compliment.
"I would, but I'd rather spend Dave's money and have someone else do it right. Besides, I couldn't do it alone anyway."
When we started to unload the package from the back of her pickup, I saw that she was right about that. We really needed three or four people to unload it. How we finally got that sucker off the truck and into their pole barn without breaking it is beyond me.
"Is that it?" I asked once we had it in the barn.
"No, there's a bag of hardware in the back. I can get it, though," she said.
We walked back out to the truck. Sam stepped up onto the open tailgate and grabbed the bag from the front of the bed. As she came to the edge of the tailgate to get out, though, the slick sole of her boot slid off the edge of the tailgate and she started to fall. The bag of hardware went flying.
Fortunately, I was there to make a perfect catch. Sam, not the hardware. Now, even though I'm 6 feet tall and 26 years old, my knees buckled just slightly as she hit me. My left arm cradled her back and my right arm swept underneath the backs of her legs. Like I said, a perfect catch, almost as if I had picked her up in my arms to carry her.
It took me a moment to notice that in catching her, my right arm had somehow gone under her skirt so my upper arm and forearm were against bare skin while cradling her thighs. I became aware of it when I closed the fingers on my right hand and felt the warmth and texture of her skin rather than her skirt. She had almost instinctively put her right arm around the back of my neck when I caught her, so our faces ended up quite close together.
I didn't put her down right away. Inexplicably, I stood there holding her for a moment, looking at her face and into her eyes. Her green eyes were so beautiful; they seemed to hold me entranced. And she didn't seem to be in any hurry for me to put her down, either. She had brought her left arm up and now had both arms around my neck. It was probably only a few seconds, but it seemed as if we held onto each other for minutes. Finally, I put her down. We found that we were still looking at each other, though.